Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Gundrak Attack!

Saturday night found Skronk and Vikund hanging out on the Gundrak summoning stone.

Nice view, eh?

See what happens when you give people flying mounts. They perch on top of everything.

We found our way to Gundrak, which wasn’t that hard given that it occupies most of one end of the Zul’Drak zone. Finding the actual entrance to the instance was a bit of a challenge, as it is not part of the giant, obvious structure at the end of the zone. You can see the “not the instance” building in the picture behind us. And that is just a bit of it.

Instead, you back up from said structure until you get to the giant captured named rhino, then turn either left or right 90 degrees and you’ll find one of the two entrances, located in small (relative to the main structure) out buildings.

The one to the left also has the summoning stone.

We had been warned off attempting Gundrak two weeks back in a couple of comments that said it was a level 80 instance and that we should attempt Halls of Stone instead. However, I could find nothing that indicated that Gundrak was a level 80 instance and a couple of sources that said it was meant for levels 76-78, including the WoW wiki instances by level page, so we decided to press ahead.

And so Skronk and I hung out on the summoning stone. The login server appeared to be having issues and was keeping Ula and Bung from getting into the game. Meanwhile, Earl was running a bit late as he was clearing up from having friends over for the Ultimate Fighting pay per view event. So we bided out time. We picked up some quests for the instance. We found the local flight point. I showed off the engineering parachute enchant for my cloak, skydiving and successfully landing on top of the summoning stone.

Eventually Blizzard relented and Ula and Bung were able to get into the game. Then Earl arrived with the message that he was ready for a summon and that one should not serve buffalo wings for an Ultimate Fighting event as guests will steer clear of them once people start beating on each other TV.

I had scouted the entrances on a previous night and decided that the one across the rhino-burdened courtyard from the summoning stone would be the best choice, if only for its lack of snakes.

Fortunately, since we ended up with a train of angry mobs chasing us, the login server problems seemed to take the pressure off of the instance server, so for the first time in weeks we were able to get into an instance on the first try.

We entered on the troll side of the instance. There is a little arena and a troll sparring match going on, all of which we managed to clear out without much problem, even when we got some adds from a patrol. That left us with Moorabi, a straightforward boss who obliged us by dying in a quick and straightforward manner. He coughed up the Frozen Scepter of Necromancy which did not interest anybody. It looked like it had potential for Skronk, but the need to mate it with a decent off-hand item put a damper on that, so it went to a greed roll. 12 gold for somebody.

Behind Moorabi there was a clickable device. When clicked, it sent out a beam of light that dropped a weight onto a mechanism in the center of the instance. We were all pretty sure at that point that this was part of unlocking the final boss fight, so kept out eyes open for similar devices.

The brought us around the elemental segment, where living mojo elementals drop nasty purple pools of goo that do an annoying amount of damage. After an accidental death we took care to keep out feet dry when we could. We cleared out the area, running into an familiar looking object.

This is history Dr. Jones!

Then we were left with the Drakkari Colossus which was surrounded by six living mojo elementals. We weren’t sure how this was going to play out, so Bung hit one of them with a banish, just to see what would happen. It turns out that they all get inside the colossus to run it. But with one banished, we could just picture the other five in their, impatient, trying to get the last guy to get a move on.

C'mon, get in the colossus already!

That fight was a little more of a challenge, as part way through a giant living mojo jumps out of the colossus, attacks and then spews pools of the aforementioned purple living mojo goo, which meant dancing him around the room until we took him down. This happened twice before we finished the fight.

We found another clickable device, and activated it, then moved on to the next area, which was all about snakes.

Here we had our only wipe of the evening. There is an oval shaped pool in the room with the next boss, Slad’ran, and on either side of it there is a moving patrol of three elites. The pull got mis-timed however, and so we hit them just at the two groups came together at one end of the pool, which meant that we got all six. We killed two and went down.

Post-wipe recovery

That aside, we were able to get in, clean out the remainders, stomp on the many level 1 snakes in the room, then turn out attentions to Slad’ran. He wasn’t a big fight. He calls on some minions at a couple of points, but Earl grabbed aggro, we beat everybody down, and that was that.

One final clickable device and then the center of the instance rotated and there was a ramp leading to some stairs and, we guessed, the final boss. We ran back around to where the Drakkari Colossus had been and started across the ramp.

Something big at the top

The stairs were defended by trolls on rhinos. Ula did a good job, sheeping the rider so we could kill his mount with each one, until we were left with just Gal’darah at his altar.

Rhinos, why did it have to be rhinos?

Gal’daran continued the rhino theme by transforming into a rhino for part of the fight, a rhino that charged party members at random knocking them down and doing a good deal of damage. Still, we managed to put out enough damage to limit the amount of time Gal’daran spent in rhino form. He didn’t last much longer and soon we had the achievement.

Plus, in the achievement screen shot there was what looks to be an extremely aggressive heal hitting Earl. It looks like Skronk hit him in the back of the head with a slushball of healing.

Have some health!

So there we stood, victorious over Gal’daran.

Gal'darah Defeated!

He was kind enough to leave his signet ring behind for Earl. And that was that. We got through without a boss wipe and without having to delve into the web to figure out what to do.

We walked out the back of the instance and headed off to turn in the quests. All in all, given the late start, we were done in good time and spent a little while finishing up another quest we picked up out by Gundrak.

After that, we called it a night. Next up on the list is the Halls of Stone. Good thing a few of us have cold weather flying because it doesn’t look like the kind of place you can walk to.

I actually three manned UP back before we were raiding but needed a fourth for Oculus so its arguable if they’re *really* level 80 dungeons. Halls of Lightning was fun too. There were tight spots in most of those.

I have yet to set foot in the Culling of Stratholme instance so I can’t really comment. It was so far out of the way and no one ever seemed to suggest it. BTW, there is a portal to the Caverns of Time in Dalaran, it’s in the tower where the Kirin Tor faction quartermaster can be found.

Come back to this on Heroic, and you will be surprised at how much harder it is than the Normal version.
The snake boss is a wiper, no mistake, as is the final boss if you are unlucky with impales and random stampedes.

The impales get worse as time goes on. I did the Achievement to get 5 people impaled in a single fight… and by the end both our clothies were 1-shot as his implaes became more and more powerful.

GD is one of the last places I still need an Achievement for my Proto-Drake. Less-Rabi is an amazingly difficult Achievement. Our 25 man Ulduman geared group consistantly missed an interrupt in the last 10% ultimately ACCIDENTALLY killing him when we missed an interrupt at 4%.